NINE: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture

Every April 15, major-league ballplayers wear the number 42 commemorating Jackie Robinson’s first game with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. With each passing year, details of Robinson’s travails recede (although the recent film 42 vividly recalls them). William C. Kashatus intends Jackie and Campy to offer “an important corrective to what has become a sanitized retelling of their relationship and its impact on baseball’s integration process” (9). Kashatus mostly achieves his goal in clean and readable prose, but we needn’t accept the hyperbole of his subtitle. Standard biographies of Robinson (Rampersad) and Campanella (Lanctot) describe their mutual dislike, while the breaking of baseball’s color line is surely not an untold story. The virtue of Jackie and Campy is to highlight their relationship in the context both of the championship Dodgers teams and of the civil rights campaigns of the 1940s and 1950s.

Kashatus paints Robinson and Campanella as ideological descendants of two archetypal figures in African American history: W. E. B. DuBois, the activist, and Booker T. Washington, the accommodationist. In this scheme, the seeds of strife between Jackie and Campy sprout from their opposite temperaments (combative versus stolid) and their differing strategies toward claiming their proper spaces in both baseball and the public sphere. Robinson was proactive and aggressive, while Campanella preferred exemplary displays of ability and performance. Their contrasting responses to civil rights inequities, “active defiance” versus “passive resistance,” exacerbated their conflict. Of course, there were also more personal irritants at work. Campy later came to feel that he should have been the first to break the color barrier, whereas Kashatus suggests that Robinson ultimately became jealous of Campanella’s three mvp awards and frustrated with his failure to speak out against discrimination.

Jackie and Campy features capsule biographies of the principals and abbreviated histories of black baseball and Brooklyn. There is not much new in these sections, but they are integral to Kashatus’s portraits of Brooklyn and Branch Rickey: “Rickey believed that Brooklyn, with its racial tolerance, growing African American population, die-hard working-class fans, and penchant for the underdog was the ideal place … to integrate baseball” (30). Kashatus rebuts the canard that Rickey’s principal concern was monetary; in his view, Rickey’s motivation was ethical.

As early as 1943, Rickey began to scout Negro League players for Brooklyn, [End Page 145] a search that would bring Robinson to the Dodgers in 1947 and Campanella in 1948. Kashatus contrasts the mostly favorable experiences of Robinson at Montreal and Campanella at Nashua, New Hampshire, in the minor leagues (where both players were league mvps) with the prejudice and discrimination while attending spring training in the American south. Robinson’s oft-recounted tribulations are rehearsed again: the 15–1 owners’ vote against integration, with Rickey the only proponent; the petition against Robinson drawn up by southerners on the Dodgers, quashed by manager Leo Durocher; the savage race-baiting by the Phillies, egged on by manager Ben Chapman; and the death threats in Cincinnati. When the Cardinals threw beanballs at Robinson, Durocher ordered retaliation against Stan Musial: “You’re the best player I know on the Cardinals. For every time he gets a knockdown pitch, it looks to me like you’re going to get two” (111). The lesson was learned. Robinson’s stoic endurance gradually engendered his team’s support, led by shortstop Pee Wee Reese, and eased the path for Campanella in 1948. The respect earned by Robinson carried over to Campy. Southerner Preacher Roe related that Campy would “say ‘Now you just do what ol’ Campy tells ya and I guarantee we’ll get by,’ and it’d be that way” (114).

Although Jackie and Campy were friendly at first, roomed together on the road, and worked with disadvantaged youth in Harlem, their relationship began to unravel in 1949...